Nature's Template

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June 24, 2025

Nature's Template

One of our core values at Polyface is following nature’s template. What does this actually mean?

Our culture seems to be moving further away from nature, and our thoughts about it can tend to be relegated to recreational activities like hiking and leisurely moments of spending time in the garden. But the natural world is around us 24/7 teeming with life and there is much we can learn from its patterns.

I would like to explore three patterns we see in nature and show you how we seek to implement each pattern in how we raise our Polyface animals.

1.) Diversity

Nature does not put things in boxes like we can be prone to do. Instead, everywhere you look, nature thrives on diversity. Let’s take plants as an example; a healthy natural habitat (think prairie or forest, etc) needs to have multiple species to function. Grasses and other plants bring different minerals to provide healthy soil. Animals all form a part of a food chain which requires a diverse number of animals (predators and prey) to form a healthy ecosystem.

At Polyface, we seek to mimic and therefore encourage the natural ecosystems around us. We invite diversity into the picture as we graze in a way to encourage the growth of native grasses, erect bird houses to welcome our feathered friends and build ponds to stimulate a growing community of pond life.

2.) Symbiotic Relationships

In the same vein, we see nature not working as a lone wolf but in relationship. In the same way that diversity can be critical to the health of an ecosystem, symbiotic relationships can ensure survival between species. Have you ever seen videos of the flocks of birds that follow herds of wild buffalo eating flies, etc? This is an example of a symbiotic relationship. A relationship which benefits both parties, often providing protection or needed nutrients to each other.

This is the idea behind the Polyface egg mobile. We use chickens to come behind where the cows have grazed to eat fly larvae and clean up and sanitize the pasture. The pigs turn our cows manure for us, turning it into compost. The cows graze down long grass to make it a suitable height for the poultry to be able to enjoy. All over the farm, you can see examples of these symbiotic relationships!

3.) Functionality and beauty

Many things in life seem to hang on a balance beam between two extremes and I view functionality and beauty as one of these spectrums. On the one hand, nature doesn’t waste things, it has built in building crews, clean up crews and more. But nature is so utterly beautiful, a magnificent creation that takes your breath away. Nature somehow performs its functions in a glorious, beautiful way. We need the sun for mere survival yet each sunrise and sunset is so breathtaking and it doesn’t have to be.

We try to model this juxtaposition at Polyface. No, we don’t have random things around the farm that are there just because, we are a working farm that is seeking to raise clean meat for you and teach others to do the same. But at the same time, we hope that you can see the ordered beauty of nature shine through as we work, talk to you, build structures, graze animals and maintain our farm.

Polyface is dedicated to following nature’s template to bring you the best meat to nourish your family. Three ways we do this is by encouraging diversity, implementing symbiotic relationships between species and embracing both functionality and beauty.

Come out to the farm to visit and see for yourself the nature that is cultivated around here each day!

Blessings,

Priscilla

Tour Bus Chef

Food Shortages

I'm in Oregon today speaking at the Azure Harvest Festival and a question from the audience during a Q&A stimulated a lot of discussion: "What do you think about the possibility and preparation surrounding food shortages?" David Stelzer, founder of Azure Standard, answered that the issue is not food volume, it's food nutrition. That was an interesting answer that has a lot of merit. As a nation, we are overfed and undernourished. This is the crux of the MAHA movement and the epidemic diseases we see in our country. At Polyface, we know the pastured meat and poultry we produce is far superior in essential phytochemicals and other nutrients due to the carotenes, exercise, and stress-free habitat we offer. You can taste the difference, feel the difference in texture, and measure it empirically. Perhaps my most poignant affirmation was our cat test. We purchased meat from the supermarket and offered our own for the four cats. They wouldn't touch the conventional meat (ground beef). Even though two plates and four cats would be much easier to accommodate if they spread out, all four crowded around the plate with our meat, eating it all and licking it up, before later sniffing and gingerly eating the supermarket counterpart. Since cats don't understand TV ads or USDA propaganda, they know what's good and what's not. We encourage anyone dismissive of food differences to ask their pets: you can trust them far more than doctors and experts. Yes, I get the nutrient deficiency angle on the shortage question. But I'd like to explore it a bit further. Right now, the world throws away more human-edible food, as a percentage of production, than at any time in human history. The planet is awash in food. Some 40 percent gets thrown away because it has a slight blemish, exceeds the sell-by date, or is tainted in some way. We have a fundamentally segregated food supply rather than an integrated one, and that creates a lot of unusable waste. The vulnerabilities of our food system, I think, are much more subtle. When I was in Uruguay two years ago, speaking at a conference, one of the other presenters was from Germany and showed a soil map of the globe. Not a single commercial agricultural region had a stable or positive soil trajectory. Every single area on the planet is losing soil; some faster than others, but globally our soil depletion continues without any sign of abatement. This is not a good trajectory. As much as the technocrats promise food without soil, that's not the way to bet. Soil is the skin of the earth. When it goes, famine results. The main difference now compared to centuries ago is that we have the capacity to move food around. Nobody starves due to a lack of food on the planet; they starve due to socio-political unrest and dysfunction. But what happens when massive areas can't grow anything anymore? Even being able to move food around doesn't help when there isn't enough. The soil trajectory does not look good. But at Polyface, we're building soil. Areas covered with shale (layered rocks) half a century ago now have a foot of soil on them. That's not the 3-5 feet that 150 years of inappropriate tillage eroded, but it's a build-back start. In addition to soil loss, as a planet we're seeing hydrologic decreases. The Oglala aquifer, which undergirds the irrigated agriculture in five states, has dropped more than 100 feet in the last half-century. At its current rate, it will be unpumpable in about 50 more years. Imagine if all those circular irrigation pivots in Nebraska and Kansas shut down. What then? At Polyface, we keep building ponds to inventory surface runoff. By definition, surface runoff occurs when rains come too fast at once or too much at one time for the soil to absorb it. Holding that and using it strategically in a drought is a way to reduce flooding during rain events and grow grass when it gets dry. This is one of the most landscape resilient techniques we can implement. Finally, major animal and plant diseases threaten the world's food systems like never before. African swine fever, hoof and mouth disease in cattle, and bird flu in poultry appear to be getting worse and covering larger areas. Why? We believe it's because chemicals and factory farming compromise the immunological systems in both plants and animals. Monocrops and chemical fertilizers wreak havoc on immune systems, opening the planet's food systems to new levels of fragility. In contrast, at Polyface, we believe happy animals and biodiversity offer the best antidote to immunological deficiency. Stress from unsanitary conditions, mono-species density, or dietary deficiency (rations or fertilizer) invites disease. Nature uses disease to cull the weak. Predators pick off the stragglers. This is the way biology works. But at Polyface, we keep these vulnerabilities at bay with compost fertilization, pasture rotations, and lots of species diversity, including pollinators and wildlife. Here's the point: the basic long-term vulnerabilities in the planet's food systems could all be reversed with practices Polyface uses every day. Looked at another way, the entire food shortage question could be answered if eaters and farmers implemented these ecological and immunological protocols, working together to rather than completely separated. We don't need to fall into an abyss of starvation. If we all simply began eating food from farms that build soil, increase water, and stimulate immunity, we could deliver a hospitable, abundant planet to our children. Reversing these trajectories wouldn't take much time or money. It takes intentionally-minded folks who connect the chain of sustenance from their plate to the planet. Polyface patrons do that. Thank you. Let's heal the land together. Joel

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Nature's Template

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